Clinton comes alive with Latino audience in Texas

Hillary Rodham Clinton demonstrated Thursday one of the biggest reasons she will be exceedingly difficult for any of her Democratic rivals to overtake: Latino voters.

Parachuting into San Antonio to pick up an endorsement from Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, who is often mentioned as a possible running mate, Clinton rallied supporters and went deep on policy in a session with the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. During the short visit, she put on full display how deep and durable are her ties with one of the most important voting blocs in the nominating contest.

Along the way, a candidate who often struggles to connect demonstrated how much more alive she can seem with a Latino crowd.

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“I love being ‘La Hillary,’” she told her enthusiastic supporters here, in reference to the affectionate nickname some of her backers use. “I want you to know I am not just La Hillary, I am also Tu Hillary” -- your Hillary.

The crowd roared with appreciation as Clinton recounted hours she spent walking the streets of San Antonio as a volunteer four decades ago in the 1972 election, registering voters with the bushy-haired boyfriend who would go on to become her husband and eventually the president.

“I was a blond girl from Chicago,” she said. “But I drove around south Texas and the valley. People welcomed me into their homes. I sat at a lot of kitchen tables. I drank a lot of strong coffee. I listened as people shared their worries, their stories, their dreams.”

Democrats are unlikely to make a serious challenge in Texas -- a state that has voted for Republicans in every presidential election since 1980. But Latino voters will be key to the outcome in several states that will be hotly contested, including Nevada, Colorado and Florida.

Latinos could be even more important in the outcome of the primaries. As a group, they voted heavily for Clinton when she ran for the nomination in 2008, and so far she has maintained a large lead among them this time around.

Addressing the crowd here, Clinton strung together a narrative from a repertoire of anecdotes familiar to those who follow her as she campaigns. In some appearances, those tales fall flat, here, she showed how effective they can be.

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Almost everything Clinton said, she hooked to the experience of immigrants and their children. During the session with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, she charged that the rhetoric of the Republican candidates, which she characterized as anti-immigrant, is dangerous.

“We have to ask ourselves hard questions about how … some of the really harsh inflammatory language coming from Republican candidates about Hispanics has just added to the ongoing problem we face,” she said.

“Condemning people with this type of rhetoric” makes people feel “free to not only speak in pejorative terms, but even act in a way that is prejudiced and hurtful,” Clinton said.

At the rally later in the day, she recalled the language Donald Trump has used to talk about Mexican immigrants and repeated a line she has used before: “Basta!” -- Spanish for “enough.”

The crowd had probably heard Clinton use the line before. Still, it went wild.

“For me,” Clinton said, “this is personal.”

She joked about the mango ice cream she had consumed hanging out with immigrant families in Texas, she recounted how touched she had been to see immigrant children jumping into the arms of their farmworker parents when she babysat for them as a teenage volunteer, she put immigration reform in more human language than her opponents have managed.

Emilia Flores, a 70-year-old nurse, said she had tuned out Clinton before the rally, sick of hearing about the controversies involving her emails and the Clinton Foundation and everything else.

After Thursday, however, she said she had made up her mind to vote for Clinton.

“She sounded like she personally is feeling for us,” Flores said. “She’s got the knowledge of what we go through.”

Armando Gonzalez, a 65-year-old retired carpenter, said of Clinton’s recollections: “You never hear that.… It gets you kind of teary. It is true. As migrants, we are treated like second-class citizens.”

Gonzalez, whose parents were Mexican immigrants, said Clinton’s forceful speech on behalf of immigrants reminded him of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. And in talking about his own experience, he put in a nutshell why making those connections are so crucial to the outcome of the election.

“My parents were immigrants who couldn’t vote,” he said. “But now I can, and now my kids can vote. And we’ve got all these votes, and they are all going Democrat.”

For more on the Clinton campaign, follow @EvanHalper.

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